The addition of storage is also helping bring down solar prices in some areas. In January, Xcel Energy received a median bid price of $21/MWh for wind-plus-storage projects and $36/MWh for solar-plus-storage projects. That beat out the $45/MWh price for a solar-plus-storage project hit last year in a PPA between Tucson Electric Power and NextEra Energy.

In March, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said costs to install utility-scale solar systems declined 10% to 15% annually from 2010 through 2016. But just how long can prices continue falling?

Solar analyst Ben Attia told Greentech Media that “highly competitive tenders will see cost compression, and there is still room for costs to fall further, but there isn’t as much breathing room on the leading edge.”

For perspective, here are some of Lazard’s electric production prices for 2016.

A huge glut of global solar panels has led to sharp price drops that have muted the effect of the Trump administration’s import tariffs on solar.

Trade wars have unpredictable results, and solar power is a classic case in point.

In 2017, when Trump was considering putting tariffs on imported solar cells and panels, U.S. companies started buying and stockpiling foreign panels, which drove up prices. Then in January, the President imposed a 30 percent tariff.

“If you are building a large power plant your pricing has certainly come back at least halfway to what it was pre-tariff, if not all the way,” as SunPower Corp CEO Tom Werner told Reuters Monday. “It’s muting the impact of tariffs.”

Prices could fall up to 35 percent this year. And while that is good news for those who want to install solar panels, it undercuts the supposed goal of Trump’s tariffs — to increase domestic production.

Musk noted that Tesla had shut down a Powerwall battery manufacturing production line in order to make more batteries for its Model 3 car, but said “we’re adding new cell lines and we’ll be able to address” cell shortages very soon.

Jeffrey Straubel, Tesla’s chief technology officer, noted that the 1 GWh number the company offered analysts for guidance is “a big number … maybe on the order of 300% what we did the prior year and we’re still aiming at maybe another 3 times to 4 times growth for 2019.”

“These are insane growth levels,” Musk said.

Meanwhile, progress on one of the stickiest problems of Li-On batteries:

Researchers at Michigan Technological University are using century-old mining techniques to recycle lithium-ion batteries at low cost. It helps that Lei Pan, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, has a graduate degree in mining engineering. Pan had a suspicion the techniques used in the mining industry 100 years ago to separate metal from ore might work for recycling batteries today, so he suggested his engineering students pursue that line of inquiry.

As so often happens in basic research, the process involved plenty of late hours and dead ends. “My mind goes back to the beginning, when nothing was working,” says Trevyn Payne, a chemical engineering senior. “A lot of times it was, honestly, ‘Let’s just try this.’ Sometimes when things worked out, it was kind of an accident.” Another senior, Zachary Oldenburg gave an example to Michigan Tech. “We were trying all kinds of solvents to liberate chemicals, and after hours and hours, we found out that plain water worked the best.”

The team used tried and true mining industry techniques to separate everything in the battery — the casing, metal foils, the anode and cathode, and the lithium-metal oxide that is the most valuable component. Those basic components and materials can be used to make new batteries. “The biggest advantage of our process is that it’s inexpensive and energy efficient,” says student Ruitang Zhan. “For the purpose of remanufacturing, our recycled materials are as good as virgin materials, and they are cheaper,” Oldenburg adds.

“We saw the opportunity to use existing technology to address emerging challenges,” Pan says. “We use standard gravity separations to separate copper from aluminum, and we use froth flotation to recover critical materials, including graphite, lithium and cobalt. These mining technologies are the cheapest available, and the infrastructure to implement them already exists.”

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Battery recycling is in its infancy at the moment but will become a critical part of the transition to zero emissions vehicles as more and more electric cars take to the road. The low cost, low energy process created by Pan and his team could become solve one of the thorniest problems involving electric cars — what to do with lithium-ion batteries when they reach the end of their useful life.

[…] Continue to Plunge: Battery Growth “Insane”. Here’s a good summary of trends at Climate Denial Crock of the Week: “…The addition of storage is also helping bring down solar prices in some areas. In […]

[…] Continue to Plunge: Battery Growth “Insane”. Here’s a good summary of trends at Climate Denial Crock of the Week: “…The addition of storage is also helping bring down solar prices in some areas. In […]

Look at the difference between rooftop residential and rooftop commercial. It’s huge, as much as 3 times cheaper, probably because with commercial you are dealing with a big, flat expanse of roof.

This same advantage would be seen with utility-scale PV, even if it used non-thin film panels.

The next time you read someone talking about cost advantages of residential solar, remember this graph. I would imagine the differences would be even more dramatic in the U.S.

Now look at the cost shown in the graph of thin-film utility scale. It is as much as 5 times less expensive than rooftop. The question is – how is it’s longevity? The answer is: it’s complicated.

Thin film initially is rated at 160 percent of its final output rating – it degrades rapidly during its first few weeks, then stabilizes. It also maintains its rating better than poly- or monocrystalline panels in extreme heat. But it has a reputation for poor longevity. Is that changing?

It would be *really* interesting to hear from experts just how good thin-film panels have gotten lately, and what advances have been made recently re longevity.